Six years ago tomorrow, I married the best person ever, and we're currently in Vegas celebrating this milestone. Best anniversary gift ever? Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2013 shortlist announced -- and the Time Lord is among the finalists for The Particle at the End of the Universe. We're beaming with pride over here.

Cyclist Time-Trial Dilemma Solved. On a closed track against a powerful head/tailwind, what racing strategy should a cyclist adopt? One engineer has derived a simple rule-of-thumb that gives the answer.

Science has figured out how to get you served at a crowded bar. Or has it? Not so fast, says Scicurious, who suffers from "bar invisibility" and would dearly love to hear about a solution. This bartending paper is not about you. "Who was this paper about? It was about a robot [named James]. Specifically, it's about getting a robot to successfully socially interact with humans."

Scientific Discovery, Frame by Moving Frame: New York Times video series takes you into the lab. "The pervasiveness of digital photography and video is changing how science is done and how it is brought to the public. Now you can often see science happening before your eyes."

Synthetic Spider Silk Capsules Assemble Themselves. “'We called this Spiderbag,' said Thomas Scheibel, a protein-chemist-turned-engineer.... The tiny spheres... are about as strong as glass — comparable to the ornamental globes that hang on Christmas trees, 'just a few sizes smaller.'”

Wake of the Colorado Flood Fractals. "The flooding here in Colorado has killed eight people, destroyed more than 1,800 homes, and caused untold misery among the many thousands of people whose homes and businesses were damaged. But in its aftermath, nature is asserting itself in a beautiful way as well."

"Otto Frisch got a Nobel Prize for figuring out the mechanics of fission. It seemed like he would be the last person to underestimate it. But he came within a couple of seconds of getting killed by the fission tester he named Lady Godiva."

"The whiteboards have dozens of fans." Meet David Saltzberg, The Man Who Gets The Science Right On The Big Bang Theory. Always nice to see David getting some media love for all his hard work.

The Simpsons' secret formula: it's written by maths geeks. Simon Singh goes to Hollywood and finds a team dedicated to inserting gags about complex maths problems. And you thought it was just a cartoon

A Fantastically Clear, Concise Explanation of Why Traffic Happens: "A human inability to maintain a steady speed and following distance on the highway makes traffic a lot less smooth than it could be." Also see my own blog post from 2011.

The life and death of Buran, the USSR shuttle built on faulty assumptions. After concluding the US Shuttle was a weapons platform, the USSR wanted its own.

Quantum Field Theory, String Theory, and Predictions, Part 1. Matt Strassler is back, on a mission to tell us more about the nuances of quantum field theory. "Our understanding of quantum field theory, while perhaps no longer in its infancy, is still clearly in adolescence, at best — and it seems likely to me that we know even less than we think." Here's Part 2.

Searching for E.T. in All the Wrong Places. "Scientists are re-thinking some of the goals behind searching for Earth-like exoplanets in the first place, in particular the quest for so-called “Super-Earth” planets, which are like ours, but far more massive."

Atomic goal: 800 years of power from waste. TerraPower, a start-up led by Bill Gates, is at work on a new kind of reactor fueled by today’s nuclear waste.

Cyborg Astrobiologist Put Through its Paces in West Virginian Coalfields. Astrobiologists are overwhelmed by the huge volume of images from other planets. Now they have help in the form of a system that automatically identifies objects of interest in geological images.

Billiards, and How to Give a Good Maths Talk. "It is surely true that any piece of abstract mathematics can be traced back through its history to an interesting intuitive problem or idea. Now it’s this, the thing that started it all, that you should be telling the people outside of your field, rather than starting your spiel with Wojciechowski’s nineteenth lemma on the quasi-regularisation of modular semi-primitive topological bananas."

Leeds University mathematicians think they have a solution to the Mystery of the Moving Magnetic Field.

The chocolate bar that revealed the microwave. "Percy Spencer, just after the end of World War II, was working on a power tube for the Raytheon Corporation. Nothing might have come of it, if it weren’t for one heroic chocolate bar that gave its life for modern society."

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers.